Roaring City

As a PI, Beaumont's (O'Brien) got all the macho moves and snappy rejoinders down pat. In fact, dialog may be the programmer's chief asset. The movie's really two separate half-hour stories in a single one-hour package, but don't bother with the plots. They're too complex for brief run-times, and really just an excuse to move the cast around cheap apartment sets. I'm just sorry we don't see more of atmospheric San Francisco where the shenanigans ostensibly occur. I could also have used more of the stately blonde (Valerie) instead of guys in trench coats threatening one another. Seems like O'Brien's main purpose is to get slugged and then wake up amid dead bodies. Nothing special or unusual here, except for Ward Cleaver making a pretty darn good tough guy. Trouble is the blended half-hours are more unwieldy than satisfying.

"Roaring City" (1951) was the second of three "Dennis O'Brien" mystery films starring Hugh Beaumont. Actually, each of the three has two parts, each a half-hour segment episode that somewhat obviously was supposed to be part of a planned television series which didn't materialize. They're all actually pretty decent little shows, though the dialogue is such that Dashiell Hammett would have had to use a sledgehammer to cut the radio-style gangsterese down to size. In this "feature", as in all of them, Ed Brophy is a drunken partner - a live-in - an ex-professor whose own dialogue is basically nothing but ten dollar gibberish to say anything. It's the humor of these pieces, and it's okay, but that's about it; and Richard Travis is a cop who constantly tries to pin the murders that ubiquitously occur on O'Brien, but in the end has to admit defeat and be "glad" O'Brien helped him - I guess. Joan Valerie, Wanda McKay, and Rebel Randall fill out the female bills in the two episodes which occur here. Bad girls, all of them. Valerie and McKay give rather poor performances. Randall is better. Anthony Warde, Greg McClure, William Tannen, Abner Biberman, and a couple of others are all complicit in being bad. Mediocre stuff, but easy to watch anyway. Directed by William Berke.

This poverty row noir starring Hugh Beaumont as Dennis O'Brien, San Francisco boat salesman and traveler through the back alleys of life, is hilarious. There wasn't enough money to give it atmosphere nor any big names. It distinguishes itself in three areas - a cast now known or remembered for things not noir, how it is actually two independent storylines glued together, and that concentrated noir dialogue that sounds like something out of the satire "Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid".

I wonder if this wasn't supposed to be some kind of TV pilot, because it is divided into two thirty minute tales in which the main character, O'Brien, agrees to do something for money for some shadowy or unknown character, gets double crossed, and then has to solve what happened or take the fall. A police detective, inspector Bruger, who seems to know him always shows up to accuse him of murder. So we have a protagonist who makes bad decisions and a police detective who always draws wrong conclusions. I can see why the networks thought this might not work out in the long term.

Of course, most people know Hugh Beaumont as TV dad Ward Cleaver in Leave It To Beaver, and I have to think that gig worked out better than had he played O'Brien in a TV series knock off of this film. O'Brien's roommate and partner is "the professor" played by an out of place Ed Brophy. Brophy was an assistant director who became, after sound came in, a supporting player portraying various barely literate lugs and thugs. Here he is portraying a somewhat alcoholic intellectual who talks of Shakespeare. If you know him from any of his earlier film roles, it is a sight to be seen.

Finally, let me get to that dialogue. Absolutely do not play a drinking game every time you hear a line of over done noir dialogue that sounds like satire rather than the way actual people - hard boiled or not - would ever talk. You'll be dead in twenty minutes.

Recommended for the fun of it all.

Hugh Beaumont is an unlicensed private investigator. He gets involved in a couple of murders, almost pulled in by police inspector Richard Travis, and investigates by getting his head pounded in and with the aid of alchoholic Eddie Brophy in this brisk film noir from Lippert.

It's based on a couple of scripts from radio's Pat Novak For Hire, a local show that starred Jack Webb at the beginning of its career before it went national briefly with another performer in the lead role. There's a lot of exposition, fancy metaphors, and a voice over by Beaumont explaining what's going on.

On the plus side, the copy was one of the few good prints of a movie shot by Jack Greenhalgh, and is quite lovely. It shows why he was for a long time, the youngest member of the American Society of Cinematographers. Despite the script not being opened up particularly for the movies, it has some striking images.

Hugh "Leave it to Beaver" Beaumont stars in "Roaring City," from 1951. The film also features Edward Brophy and Richard Travis.

This was apparently one of three feature films that combined two half-hour stories, which answers the question as to why these stories weren't connected. Denny O'Brien (Beaumont) is man with a ship he rents, but he also does odd jobs. He rooms with an alcoholic ex-professor (Brophy) who does some work for him.

The first story concerns a fixed fight that O'Brien is hired to bet on; in the other one, he is hired to pretend to be a woman's husband. These jobs are not without problems. In the fight story, it doesn't go the way it was supposed to; in the other -- well, it's not as straightforward as it first seemed.

Denny usually winds up unconscious or beaten and in hot water with a police inspector. Hugh Beaumont does a good job in the role - he's natural and charming.

I'm not exactly the audience for these low-budget Bs, but I appreciate that they have their place in the noir canon.